The Sirian Experiments

by Doris Lessing

  What was happening, Ambien I said, was that Klorathy did not make any attempt to communicate what he thought until he was asked a direct question – or until something was said that was in fact a question though it was masked as a comment. And Ambien I then went to Klorathy and inquired if this was indeed a practice of Canopus: and whether Klorathy expected to stay there, living on as he did, with these savages, until they asked the right questions … and if this was Klorathy’s expectation, then why did he expect the savages to ask the right questions?

  To which Klorathy replied that they would come and ask the necessary questions in their own good time.

  And why?

  ‘Because I am here …’ was Klorathy’s reply, which irritated Ambien I. Understandably. I felt irritated to the point of fury even listening to this report.

  Anyway, Ambien I had wanted to go, but could not, since I had the Sirian transport with me. He had in fact gone off to visit the dwarves again, by himself, another colony of them – a foolhardy thing, which had nearly cost him his life. He had been rescued by the intervention of Klorathy, who had only said, however, that ‘Sirians as yet lacked a sense of the appropriate’.

  Then had begun the ‘events’ that were not to be described as more than that.

  At last, I had arrived back, and he, Ambien I, could not express how he had felt when he saw the glistening bubble descend through all that grey steam, because he had believed me to be dead. And of course it was ‘a miracle’ that I had survived – to use a term from our earlier epochs.

  We stayed together that night, in emotional and intellectual intimacy, unwilling to separate, after such a threat that we might never have been together again at all.

  We decided to leave Klorathy.

  First, having pondered over what Ambien I had said about questions, how they had to be asked, I went to Klorathy and asked bluntly and directly about the Colony 10 colonists, and why we, Sirius, could not have them.

  He was sitting at his tent door. I sat near him. We were both on heaps of damp skins … but the clouds of steam were less, the earth was drying, the thundering and trickling and running of the waters already had quietened. It was possible to believe that soon these regions would again be dry and high and healthy.

  ‘I have already told you,’ said Klorathy, ‘that these colonists would not be appropriate. Do you understand? Not appropriate for Sirians, for the Sirian circumstances.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He was silent for a while, as if reflecting inwardly. Then he said: ‘You ask me, over and over again, the same kind of question.’

  ‘Why don’t you answer me?’

  Then he did something that made me impatient. He went into his tent and came out with some objects – the same things that Ambien I and I had been supplied to maintain our balance on this difficult planet.

  I at first believed that because of the recent ‘events’, certain changes in our practice were necessary, and I readied myself to take in instruction, since I knew that exactness was necessary here, and that it would not do for me to overlook even the smallest detail. (I had told him – and heard his dismayed yet patient sigh – about Adalantaland falling off in this respect, how they had not maintained the care needed to make these practices work.)

  I watched what he did. Certain kinds of stone, of natural substance, some colours, shapes, were laid before him and handled and ordered. But I was watching very carefully and saw that he made no changes in the ritual I had been using.

  ‘So nothing has had to be changed?’ I asked, knowing my voice was rough and antagonistic. ‘Not even the recent events, and the distancing of the earth from its sun, and all the other differences, are going to necessitate changes in what we have to do?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not yet. Though perhaps later, when we have monitored the exact differences. In climate, for instance. And of course the magnetic forces will be affected …’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, sarcastically, as before.

  He continued to handle the objects, precisely, carefully. I watched his face, the amber, or bronze face, long, deeply moulded, with the strong eyes that were so closely observing the movements of his hands.

  And I continued to sit there, arms locked around my knees, watching, maintaining a dry tight smile that was all criticism, and he continued patiently and humbly to manipulate his artefacts.

  I did not understand him. I thought this was a way of putting me off, of saying wordlessly that he would not answer me.

  As I formulated this thought, he said: ‘No, that is not it. But if you want to understand, then I suggest you stay on here for a time.’

  ‘For how long?’ And answered myself with, ‘For as long as necessary, I suppose!’

  ‘Yes, that’s it.’

  ‘And what sort of progress have you made? Are the savages and dwarves in an alliance? Are they ready to stand against the Shammats?’

  ‘I think it is likely the dwarves have been sealed into their caves, and that we may never see them again.’

  The way he said this made my emotions riot. The end of a species – a race – the end of the Lombi strain on Rohanda and the 22 technicians.

  He said: ‘Well, we have to accept these reverses.’

  ‘Then why are you staying on? The reason for your being here is gone – swallowed by the events.’

  ‘The tribes are still here!’

  ‘So you are not with them just because of the old hostility between them and the dwarves?’

  ‘I am here as I often am with all kinds of peoples … races … species, at certain stages in their development.’

  I did understand that here was a point of importance: that if I persisted, I would learn.

  ‘You want me to stay?’ This was a challenge: deliberate, awkward, hostile.

  ‘Yes, I think you should stay.’

  He had not said: ‘Yes, I want you to stay.’

  I got up and left him. I told Ambien I that I intended to leave. And in the morning, having said goodbye to Klorathy, we took off in our space bubble. We surveyed, rapidly, the ravages of the ‘events’ on both southern continents, and then went home to our Mother Planet.

  THE LOMBIS. MY THIRD ENCOUNTER WITH KLORATHY

  For some time I had little to do with Rohanda, which was judged by our experts as too much of a bad risk, and I was allotted work elsewhere. This was, too, the period of the worst crisis in Sirian self-confidence: our experiments everywhere, sociological and biological, were minimal.

  The populations on our Colonized Planets were at their lowest, too.

  As for me, I was pursuing thoughts of my own, for I could not get out of my mind the old successes of Canopus in forced evolution, and while whole strata of our Colonial Service and nearly all our governing class were publicly asking: What for? I was wondering if they would give room to such emotions (but they were called ideas, as heart-cries of this kind so often are, and the more so, the more they are fed by emotions and sentiments) if they had been able to watch, as I had done, creatures not much better than apes transformed into fully civic and responsible beings within such a short time. I shared these thoughts with Ambien I, with whom I was once again working, but our Empire was less tolerant then than it is now – or so I believe and hope – and the kind of social optimism that inspired me was classed in some quarters as ‘shallow irresponsibility’ and ‘sociological selfishness’. This may be the right place to remark that I had long since learned that if one is entertaining unpopular ideas, one has only to keep quiet and wait for the invisible wheels to turn that will bring those ideas back as the last word in intelligent and forward-looking thinking.

  Meanwhile, I got on with my work. It happened that I was in that part of the Galaxy where the transplanted Lombis were on Colonized Planet 25. I had not thought of them from the old time to this; but I made a detour from curiosity. It could be said that the whole Lombi experiment had been inutile. They had been carefully preserved from any contact with more evolved races, except for very
rare reconnaissance trips by Colony 22 personnel to see if it were possible to keep a certain pristine social innocence that might be of use in ‘opening up’ new planets. Yet we had nevertheless ceased to colonize new planets in the total – may I say reckless? – way that had distinguished our policies up till then: we acquired a new possession only after long and careful assessment. Our interest in the Lombis continued to the extent that we wished to monitor the possible development of evidence of a craving for ‘higher things’. From the spacecraft I made contact home to ask permission to make a small experiment of my own: it would not have been given me if the Lombis had not virtually been written off as useful material.

  We had sent no technicians there for over a thousand S-years. Their life-spans had remained at roughly two hundred R-years. This meant that as individuals they could have no memory at all of visitations ‘from the skies’.

  I ordered a rapid survey of Planet 25 sunside and nightside, at maximum speed so that we would not be observed as more than a meteorite – we were not visible at all on sunside when moving – and then, having chosen a populous area, hovered in full view for some hours, while crowds collected.

  I made as impressive a descent from the aircraft as could be devised. Unfortunately I had no formal wear with me on this working trip, but I devised a long cloak of some white insulation material, and made the most of my not exactly profuse yellow hair – it is not that I have ever wanted to be more hairy or furred than I am, but the yellow or gold-haired species always evoke awe, because of our rarity. I floated to earth from the spacecraft, and saw a multitude of the poor beasts fall to their faces before me with a deep and sorrowful groan, which did touch me, I confess, accustomed as I am to the awe so easily evoked in uncivilized races.

  I had prepared all kinds of suitably vague replies to possible questions, but found that once I had said I had ‘come from the skies’ and was their friend, that was enough: awe is a great inhibitor of intelligent questioning.

  They remembered – or their ceremonies and songs and tales did – ‘the shining ones’, and what dread they still kept from the old time on the other planets, I stilled by the most solemn promises that I would not take any of them away with me when I left.

  And what was it they were so afraid of being taken away from? The reply to that is ironical … is sad … is a comment on more than just the situation of the Lombis … my so long, my so very long career in the Service furnishes me with several similar situations …

  But first a general comment on their customs and mores.

  They had not evolved much; any more than had the parent stock on Planet 24.

  The prohibitions against covering themselves, and eating cooked and prepared food had not vanished, but had reversed; it was now for their ceremonies that they had to be naked and eat raw meat and roots and fruit. The lived as before in various types of crude shelter, hut or cave; they hunted; they wore skins; they used fire. Their basic unit was the family and not the tribe: this seemed to be retarding them. At least, as I travelled about that planet, which was adequately endowed with plant and animal life, though meagre compared to other planets – Rohanda, for instance – I was comparing these animals with the savages of the high plateaux whom Klorathy had thought it worthwhile to instruct: and such was the contrast that I was wondering for the first time if the superiority of those others was due to something innate, a superiority of a different kind and classification to those we Sirians could use, and which Klorathy and officials on his level would be able to measure? The point was that the Lombis had no capacity for development, or seemed not to have.

  I was examining these short, squat, half-furred creatures, with their immensely powerful shoulders and arms, living in their groups of three, or four – up to seven or eight, but no more – each group jealously suspicious of its patch of hunting ground, its wild fruit trees, its sources of roots and vegetables, able to mingle with other groups only on ritual occasions when they all crowded together – and remembered with admiration things that I had scorned. Where were the customs that can make even hundreds of individuals a mutually supporting and culturally expanding unit? Where the intricate ceremonial dances? The finely worked garments with their fringes, their ornamentation, the delicately used feathers? The necklaces of carved bones and stones? The instruction of the young through tales and apprenticeship? The specialization of individuals, according to innate talent, into storytellers, craftsmen, hunters, singers? Where was … but I could see nothing here anything like the skills and knowledge of the Navahis and Hoppes.

  Now I come to what was painful and pitiful in their situation. How often as I travel from one of our Colonized Planets to another am I forced to remember the natural advantages of Rohanda, with her close and shining moon, her nightside that is crammed with brilliant star clusters?

  This planet was a dark one, by nature and position. No moon here. The Lombis must have had somewhere in their gene-memory the knowledge that nights could be lit with infinite variation from a star hanging so close it seemed like a creature, a living being – and changing from a full and bright disc to the tiniest of yellow cracks one had to peer towards and watch for … The Lombis had known what it was to wait for that moment when a sun seems to slide away into dark – and then up flash the stars, giving light when a moon is temporarily absent.

  Not only was there no moon, but the nightside looked out into an almost empty sky – black upon black. In one or two places there was a faint sprinkling of light, stars far beyond our Galaxy, more like a slight greying of the night. And their sun was small and distant compared with the rumbustious Rohandan sun from which one may have to shelter, even now when it is further away than it was.

  The Lombis’ ‘shining ones’ were now these infinitely faint and nearly invisible stars. Their old festivals of the full moon took place once a year, when a vast windy plain became filled with groups of these animals who travelled long distances to be there – and they stood in their family groups, lifting their flat sorrowful faces up to their black night, and sang of ‘shining ones’.

  And their sun was a ‘shining one’, too, but their worship of it was ambiguous and double, as if it was an impostor, or tried to claim more than was due.

  When our spaceship descended, a crystal and sparkling globe that evoked from them memories or half-memories buried in them by their environment, it was as if an original primal light had suddenly appeared to them. Oh, those black stuffy nights … those interminable unaltering nights, that seemed to settle on the nightside with the sun’s disappearance like a physical oppression. A complete black, a heavy black, where a fire burning outside a cave or inside a leafy shelter seemed to hold back a felt and tangible pressure of darkness. I have never experienced anything like night on Planet 25. Never been on a planet where nothing could be done after sunset. In the daytime the Lombis ran about, and attended to their sustenance, but at night they gathered with the first sign of the sun’s going into their groups and pressed together around their little fires, cowering and waiting for that moment when a rock, or a leaf, would emerge greyly from the thick black and tell them that once again they had survived the extinction of the light.

  I left as soon as I could, making a dramatic exit from the planet, which they took on their faces, thanking me for my gracious appearance to them and my love for them. Yet I had promised nothing, told them nothing, given nothing: so easy it is to be ‘a high shining thing’! – and, speeding thankfully away from that oppressive place, I was remembering the apes on Rohanda under Canopean tutelage, and again my old dream, or if you like, ambition revived in me, and I wondered if I could not persuade Canopus now to part with some of those skilled colonists, the Giants: after all, a considerable time had passed.

  If nothing could be improved in the Lombis, what was the point of keeping them as they were?

  I sent in a report on my return home, reminding my superiors of the Lombis’ remarkable physical strength: this was on the lines of what they would have expected f
rom me. Meanwhile, I decided on guile, but nothing beyond what I believed then, and believe now, to be legitimate: only a question of interpreting my standing orders rather more liberally than would have been expected of me.

  Our relations with Canopus had been limited for some time, because of our cutback in colonial development.

  I summoned a meeting of my peer group, the Five, reminded them that it was our policy to maintain full liaison with Canopus, and asked permission to apply for a rendezvous with Klorathy: after all, it had come from them, originally, though of course the idea had been in my mind, that I should maintain contact with Klorathy. The fact that it had not led to anything then, or did not seem to have led to anything, did not mean there could never be benefits for us. I felt no enthusiasm in them, but I had become used to being the odd one out among the Five, always slightly at an angle to current norms of thought. They did not criticize me for this: it was recognized to be my role, or function. Nor did they actively discourage me now, beyond saying that since Canopus could not solve her own problems, she was unlikely to contribute to the solution of ours. This was in line with our attitude at that time; the thriving planets of Canopus, her busy trade routes, her enterprise and industriousness, was being classed by us as ‘superficiality and lack of experiential and existential awareness’. I quote from a learned journal of that time.

  The invitation I got from Klorathy was to meet him on their Planet 11. I was first gratified, since I had long waited to see this planet that we had heard was ‘important’ to Canopus and unlike any other known to either their Empire or ours. And then I found myself succumbing to suspicion: why Planet 11 and not Planet 10? For Klorathy must believe I was still after his Giants!